The things that come out of an improv comedienne's mind when she's not hooked up to an audience.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

How This Scrap Quilter Thinks

My final medal was awarded this morning:

And this is the new scrappy prayer quilt I've been working on. I'm calling it Uphill Both Ways--a nod to those ridiculous stories our parents told us about how hard it was for them. "I didn't have it easy like you young'uns. When I was a kid, we had to walk to school five miles in the snow. And it was uphill both ways." As a scrap quilter, I have to work with what I've got and not go out and buy more fabric. This can be a real pain in the b--ahem--challenge, it can be a real challenge sometimes. You see, I had a bunch of this fabric that had been seamed in strips together. I used the bulk of it for another quilt, just framing the strips like in this picture here--but I had leftovers. So I cut the leftovers into 35 5" squares--that was as big as would work--and cut them on the diagonal. I planned to frame half of them in turquoise and half in purple, kinda like this.

But it turned out that I didn't have enough turquoise fabric. So I stepped back and thought a bit. Now we wander, willy-nilly into my thought process. Okay, I'll just make half a frame. But I still have more turquoise strips.... and here's a bit of dark turquoise. How much dark do I have? With half-frames, I have just enough for 12 blocks. And I've still got enough of the light to half-frame all the rest. Hmm, this'll probably work. I'll just scatter the dark in among the light. That usually works. (a minute later) Wait! Slanty blocks, slanty quilt. Just do the corners dark! Love it. Now all I need is borders. (steps back and looks) Huh, that's weird. Looks like there's half a border already. I gotta do something about that. (picks up framing scraps) Nope, not enough for even half a border. What about (snatches up quarter yard of swirly turquoise) this? Yes, there's enough!Now to regular borders. Purple! Ooh, not too much or it'll look like a purple quilt. So a skinny purple border. And I still have some leftovers from the strip quilt: I'd hate to waste 'em. Maybe I can use 'em for the border. Yay! I'm still gonna need a final border to stabilize all those diagonal scraps. But I'm out of time. I'll have to do it later.